Quilt – ‘Held In Splendor’

Score

A strange place where psych-rock sounds pioneering and fresh

Boston’s Quilt checked into a Brooklyn studio to combine hipster flavour with dreamy psychedelia, and have come up with a record that brings a crisp newness to arrangements straight out of 1967. So there’s a lot of Love here – and Zombies and Buffalo Springfield too – but ‘Held In Splendor’ also joins Tame Impala’s ‘Lonerism’ and even Connan Mockasin’s ‘Caramel’ at a strange place where psych-rock sounds pioneering and fresh. This is all helped by the virtuosity of tracks like ‘Mary Mountain’, where surf guitar meets motorik trance, and ‘A Mirror’, with its thrash-along fuzziness. Yet Quilt really shine when Anna Fox Rochinski, Shane Butler and John Andrews harmonise impeccably over the spooky melodies of ‘Saturday Bride’ and ‘Secondary Swan’.